The Red Card

“I’ve often played a great match after having sex. Watch the 4-0 of the Roma-Juve match. I had sex that Sunday morning with one of the many friends I had at the time. It was even easier in Madrid because we were in a hotel, all on the same floor, so it was easy to invite whomever I wanted from upstairs or downstairs and meet her during the night. I had a friend who was a waiter. His job was to bring me 3 or 4 croissants after I had sex. He would bring the croissants up the stairs, I would escort the woman to him and we would make an exchange: he would take the girl and I would take the croissants. Sex and then food, a perfect night.”

                           -Antonio Cassano

England players appear to have had their chips after coach Fabio Capello revealed he had taken the traditional British favourite off the menu.

The Italian has also slapped a ban on tomato ketchup after impressing on his squad the importance of healthy eating in their quest to qualify for the next World Cup.

A football player was hit by a firework launched by opposition fans moments after the whistle was blown at the end of a cup final match last night.

Conor Hagan fell to the ground after being struck in the back by the rocket before it exploded.

His team Linfield had just suffered a 2-1 defeat by sectarian rivals Cliftonville in the County Antrim Shield final at Windsor Park in Belfast.

Chelsea have already booked their hotel for this season’s Champions League final in Rome. (Daily Star)

have to win in france, fuckers.

thehairdryertreatment:

watch the champions league game and hope liverpool looses

read general assembly disarmament resolutions and amendments

fuck around on google reader, but only in my music and sports folders

eat green and black’s dark chocolate

cheer the ill maxi rodriguez goal that just went down (fuck you liverpool)

think of that smoking sicilian wag featured on the spolier’s wag gallery

read the nyt sports section (maradona on the front page!?!?)

try to understand this iverson-to-the-pistons trade

consider which lineup and formation man u should employ against celtic

read ‘the bottom billion’ book i keep avoiding

look forward to playing soccer tonight after work

read high-level statements on the food crisis

memorize un acronyms

curse chelsea

figure out which albums to review next

think about my duty free johnnie green, grey goose, and french absinthe

laugh at jamie carragher

consider how awesome rachel maddow is

read the spokesperson for the sec-gen’s noon briefing

read up on the humanitarian situation in the congo

brew another cup of yerba mate

consider the limitation of peacekeeping mandates

shed a tear for tevez

write stupid lists

BELGRADE, October 22 (RIA Novosti) - A group of Croatian Benedictine nuns have bought shares in a leading Croatian soccer club, the Vecherniy List paper said on Wednesday.

The 19 nuns, from a convent located some 150 km (93 miles) away from the coastal city of Zadar, bought 50 shares worth around $4,500 in Hajduk Split, the nine times champions of Croatia.

The club recently became a shareholder company. The purchase made the nuns one of the club’s top 20 shareholders.

Roman Abramovich, who came to public attention in Britain when he bought Chelsea in 2003, made his fortune in post-Soviet Russia. He became involved in oil export deals and in 1995 entered the ranks of the super-rich when with Boris Berezovsky he took over oil company Sibneft for a fraction of its market value. Abramovich gained increasing control over the business and got most of the money when it was sold in 2005 for £7.5bn. More recent acquisitions include stakes in Russian steelmaker Evraz Group and a piece of the UK mining company Highland Gold. Since buying Chelsea, in a deal worth £140m, he is thought to have invested £578m in the club. He has an interest in art and was revealed as the buyer of Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (£17m) and Francis Bacon’s Triptych (£43m). He is 15th in the Forbes rich list, with £14.6bn.

no, not this one.

this one.

story

The Palestinian soccer team will play its first international game at home when it faces Jordan on Oct. 26 in a renovated stadium.

For 10 years the team has been playing “home” games in Jordan and Qatar. But its stadium in Ram has now been upgraded to meet standards set by soccer’s governing body and will be opened by FIFA president Sepp Blatter.

…The Palestinians are ranked 180th of 207 members by FIFA, peaking at No. 115 in April 2006. The national team affiliated with FIFA in 1998.

for further background on the palestinian squad, check out this extremely well-written article from a few years ago in washington report on middle east affairs.  

dani alves’ no-look feed with the outside of his right foot from barca’s cl game this week is nice on the eye.

“‘If I’m honest, we became a bit of a circus in terms of the whole WAG situation…We got caught up in the whole thing. It seemed like there was a big show around the whole England squad. It was like watching a theatre unfolding and football almost became a secondary element to the main event…People were worrying more about what people were wearing and where they were going, rather than the England football team. That then transposed itself into the team.”

-Rio Ferdinand

via kickette

today’s bbc gossip page features this gem…

Tottenham’s Russian forward Roman Pavlyuchenko has been elected a deputy for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party after winning a seat on the regional council in his home town of Stavropol. (The Guardian)

further background…

Implausibly, Pavlyuchenko has been elected a deputy for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in his home town of Stavropol, in the northern Caucasus. The 26-year-old secured a seat on the regional council as his party won 63 per cent of the vote in polls in the Russian south.

russian constituents: don’t get your hopes up though, dude is a lazy sack of shit…

I looked at my watch and saw that the training session had gone on for exactly two hours! Then, there is another half an hour in the gym. Two and a half hours. Can you imagine that?

The weights started to get to me, and I stopped and said to the trainer, ‘I can’t do this’. That’s how they work - I’m shocked. I thought it would be a lot easier.”

the story of the night was a dichotomy between two women. One, Abbey Clancy, provided some much needed class to the event, looking frankly delectable in an understated black ensemble, while the other, Jodie Marsh, took the complete opposite tack.

oh abbey clancy, why are you together with this clown?

One is a superstar footballer, garlanded with medals and the idol of Old Trafford, with a stable of fast cars including two Ferraris and a Porsche.

The other is a Nobel Laureate in her 60s, confined to a bungalow in Burma on the orders of a military junta reviled by most of the world.

The chances of their paths ever crossing were minimal, but now Ryan Giggs and Dr Aung San Suu Kyi are inadvertently squaring up for the highest honour Salford can bestow.

great find at the offsides of a hilarious slideshow from bild’s english language site chronicling the worst haircuts in bundesliga history. and damn, there are some horrendous, or as shauna of shauna eats sunnyside fame likes to say, horrendi, do’s.

To celebrate the upcoming launch of this season’s Bundesliga sticker album, BILD has gathered the most hilarious snaps of former German league stars captured by Panini.

From mullets to moustaches, the football stars of the 80s and 90s made for some of the hairiest Panini pics of all time.

bild

yeah, so this blog has sort of taken a plunge in productivity due to job responsibilities and preparing for the ridiculous amount of work i’m going to be doing for the next few weeks on top of the two teams of my own i’m playing on this fall.

but, there is just so much crazy shit going on in the footy world that i will do my best to update a little bit more regularly.

note to self: avoid pick-up games in long island!

KINSHASA, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Eleven people were killed in a stadium riot in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo after a soccer player tried to use witchcraft to win a local match, U.N.-backed Radio Okapi reported on Monday.Nyuki club was losing to local rivals Socozaki on Sunday when Nyuki’s goalkeeper advanced up the pitch and tried to use “fetishist” spells to turn the tide of the match, Okapi said, without giving more details.

seriously, this guy is such an asshole. he refused to play, for his country, because the federation president was not going to be on the plane with the team and he figured that must mean there was some sort of conspiracy to shoot down the plane or something. the reason the president was not flying with the squad: his mother’s funeral.

Togo captain Emmanuel Adebayor has refused to fly to Zambia for Wednesday’s key 2010 World Cup and Africa Cup of Nations qualifier.

The Arsenal striker’s decision came after a row with the players demanding that the president of the Togo Football Federation (TFF) travel with them.

But the TFF said Tata Avlessi Adaglo would not fly as he was preparing for the burial of his mother.

The rest of the team accepted this, but Adebayor remained in Lome.

and of course togo then lost the game.